It was the perfect CODA for my visit to Portland, Oregon, when my phone lifted when I was at the airport. Lyft informed me that my driver, who had spent 20 minutes teaching about how President Trump has been washed money for Russia for decades and that Antifa did not exist, had registered a complaint that claimed that I had discriminated against him – probably because I did not agree with his hectoring.
The most amazing thing about Portland is not how far left it is. Everyone has seen episodes or clips of the TV program “Portlandia”. It is how sure the people there are that everything is fine – that occasionally walking past dead bodies on the sidewalk is a normal American experience.
David Marcus: in Democrat Portland, Luxury, Vagrancy and total disorders
And how sure they seem to be that not only someone calls himself a Trump supporter wrong, but also immoral.
Tara Faul is a photographer established in Portland who has done excellent work to document the homeless addicts in her Woebegone birth city (and often feed). I was struck by something she placed on X while I was there.
“During a Portland concert last night I heard a man the ‘Every city is so, Bro’ to a couple outside the city who had a rough experience in our city,” she started, adding to it, “the woman was:” No, I work in the center of Detroit, and that’s not the case. “I was there this year and agrees. “
The sidewalks of Portland are teasing the tents of homeless drug addicts, but many of the citizens seem indifferent.
This perfectly made the feeling that I had – that the people in Portland are rather like a frog in boiling water. Even if the temperature rises, they don’t seem to feel the change.
Jackie, a bartender whose family has lived in the area for a century – and who is as nice as can be – told me: “You are only talking about the center. The rest of the city is not really the case.”
Of course, every city has nice neighborhoods and not so nice. But the city center is what everyone shares. It is the face of a city and in the Rose City it almost feels like Dickensian London.
Portland is very fashionable. There you see natty three -part suits, steering mustaches and hair colors of such a variety that, in large groups, the heads almost like an open bag of cones.
Just like the elites of a Charles Dickens -Story – Ticking walking sticks in their finer, using a nasal gay to reduce the smell of the masses – in Portland, human misery fades in the background, such as the quiet but continuous rain.
I could almost hear the hipsters mutter: “Are there no soup kitchens? Are there no safe injection sites?”
About a quarter of the store fronts, according to my count, are empty. What remains is all expensive. Apart from a class group in a museum, I am not sure if I saw a child for the entire four days that I was there. There is just no life in its place.
But that all this said, the pickle at the end of the day is that, of what I can see, most people in Portland think things are good – even great. And if that is true, who are we in the rest of the country to tell them that they are wrong?
That is where the warning comes for every American city. When you hand over the local government on the far left and it refuses to maintain order, you end with something like “Blade Runner”, where the rich and protected blooms, the vagrants get away and die, and everyone else stay away.
This is how you end up in a city where the local police arrest journalists for daring to cover the fact that Antifa has been in control of the streets – because if you are slightly less than a dedicated left, you can feel a little less than human.
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The message I received from Lyft at the airport of Portland indicated that I would answer by saying that I recognized the vague complaint against me. Instead, I wrote something with the power: “Your driver gave me a lecture about the evil of Donald Trump and was pretty rude.”
When I arrived at Dulles and tried to use the Lyft app, no drivers would appear for me. I actually laughed – and then just used another app.
But it is actually not funny, because this is how social credit systems work. If you say supposedly offensive, you cannot have a bank account or get a car. And I do think that many, if not most, porters who agree, agree that expressing conservative views deserves punishment.
I can say with certainty that I do not have the desire to return to Portland, but I can also say, with great fear, that I am a bit worried that Portland might come to me – and against all of us.
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